Multimedia

Language Landscape is a tool for mapping where languages are spoken around the world.

The video went into production in May 2014. Director Pablo Zanón gathered together some willing volunteers and shot the live action elements – the people talking in the Record Audio and Record Video sections. These shots were digitally manipulated to create the distinctive silhouette style and further augmented with the animated ‘speech streams’ and recording devices by animator and designer extraordinaire Tom Leisz. The thinking behind this visualization of the recording process was to make it easy for speakers of all languages to understand that everyone can contribute to the website as well as exploring and enjoying the existing content.

The rest of the video introduces the principles of adding recordings and creating projects on the website. We wanted to pick out key elements of the process which we felt were most important for new users. This includes our principle of ‘mapping where it’s happening’. We believe this is the best way to represent the geographical spread of languages as a recording of a language really only represents a moment in a person’s – and therefore also a language’s – life. See this post for more about our ideas and motivations for mapping languages in this way. We also wanted to include a section on how to create your own unique map on Language Landscape by grouping together your recordings in a project. This is a quick and easy process, and you can even add other people’s recordings to your project if they’ve ticked the ‘Other people can edit this recording’ button on their recording. The music was then composed and timed to perfection by Samu Csernak. We’d also like to say a big thanks to Tom Castle for creating the babble of voices that you can hear at around 1:56.

LINKS

CHILDREN OF THE ELEMENTS IS A BOOKSHELF APPLICATION, WHICH OFFERS HIGH QUALITY, HAND-PAINTED INTERACTIVE CHILDREN STORIES ON TABLETS.

WE BELIEVE IN STORIES THAT CARRY ADDED VALUES – MESSAGES ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY, NATURE, LOCAL AND INTERCULTURAL TOPICS. WE WORK WITH AUTHORS AND ILLUSTRATORS FROM ALL AROUND THE WORLD AND CONTINUOUSLY DELIVER NEW STORIES IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH LANGUAGES ON OUR BOOKSHELF.